No One Feels Safe in School Anymore

Adolescence and the real crisis in British education

‘These kids are fucking impossible. I mean, what am I supposed to do?’

That’s what Jamie Miller’s history teacher says to a police officer in Adolescence, Netflix’s latest viral drama. It’s a throwaway line, but it lingers. Because that’s the question pulsing through every moment of the show: What do you do with boys like Jamie?

Adolescence doesn’t flinch. It drags you into headfirst into a world where children slip through the cracks and no one—not parents, not teachers, not the police—knows how to catch them. The series follows Jamie’s family, his school, the institutions around him all scrambling to make sense of the murder of his classmate, Katie.

You’ve seen the headlines. Prime Minister Keir Starmer says the show should be screened in schools.¹ There’s no shortage of commentary: on masculinity, knife crime, misogyny, the manosphere. But too many of those takes orbit Jamie, as if he exists in a vacuum.

He doesn’t.

Because Adolescence isn’t just about a boy. It’s about the world that built him. His background. His Instagram feed. And, crucially—his school.

Image via Netflix

‘Teenage boys have a misogyny problem,’ say the headlines. In the aftermath of Adolescence, the call is clear: educate boys about misogyny to stop them falling into the online hate spiral that ended Katie’s life. Co-creator Jack Thorne said he and Stephen Graham wanted the programme to ‘cause discussion and make change.’ He added: ‘I want it to be shown in schools. I want it to be shown in Parliament. It’s crucial—because this is only going to get worse.’²

Starmer and others have echoed that sentiment. This is, they say, ‘a matter of culture.’

But culture doesn’t exist in isolation.

It’s easy to talk about failing pupils or bad behaviour, but harder to confront what’s actually happening in classrooms across Britain. Adolescence gets it right—down to the details. You watch the teachers battling not just behaviour but infrastructure: phones, rumours, leaked images, radicalised boys, traumatised girls, algorithms outpacing adults. You see a system buckling under the weight of problems it was never equipped to solve.

But I think it goes further. Beyond misogyny. Beyond the urgent need for consent workshops and classroom conversations about Andrew Tate. What Adolescence reveals, with devastating clarity, is something far deeper: a systemic rot. A culture of entitlement. A sense—shared by too many boys—that nothing really matters. And that starts in our schools.

If we want real change, we don’t just need to challenge misogyny. We need to overhaul the entire education system.

The students in Adolescence are addicted to their phones. That isn’t an exaggeration—it’s one of the forces that leads directly to Jamie’s radicalisation and Katie’s murder. These kids are growing up in an environment where it takes thirty seconds to access violent pornography. Where a few gym videos turn into a stream of misogynist hate content, men’s rights influencers, and podcasts about ‘high value men.’

And it’s not just boys. I can open TikTok right now and easily find eating disorder content on my For You Page, even if I haven’t liked or searched for anything that looks like it. From there, it’s a short trip down the toxic femininity rabbit hole: trad wives, unattainable beauty standards, discipline over hunger. It’s not just that boys become violent—it’s that all children, regardless of gender, are being shaped by the same toxic digital culture.

For children from deprived backgrounds, that pull is even stronger. When you don’t feel seen or valued in the real world, it’s easy to disappear into the curated worlds of the algorithm. These spaces promise self-worth, structure, community—even if what they’re selling is ultimately harmful.

The government’s response? In recent years, it’s flirted with the idea of a blanket mobile phone ban in English schools, insisting it would restore discipline.³ I wouldn’t be surprised if those conversations resurface in light of Adolescence. But teachers already know the truth: the problem isn’t the device—it’s the culture that lives inside it. You can ban phones. You can’t ban the algorithm.

When social media becomes an addiction, of course it spills into school life. You see it in Adolescence—in episode two, students are repeatedly told to put their phones away, only to gather again in huddles, watching and whispering. Even in schools with strict bans, you can’t watch hundreds of kids every second of the day. Teachers can’t win.

And they shouldn’t be expected to.

I want to pause here, because I know how this might sound. I’m veering into moral panic territory—like I’m some ageing reactionary mourning the death of discipline, or one of those Conservatives who backed mandatory national service in a desperate bid to win the last general election. The kind who insists that what British teenagers need is a military-style structure and a firm hand.

So let me be clear: I’m a young person. I’m firmly on the left. I believe in care, not control. But I also think we need to be honest about where these right-wing, tough-on-youth talking points are coming from. They haven’t emerged from nowhere. They’re a reaction to something real. There is a discipline crisis in our school. There is a care crisis. Pretending otherwise helps no one.

In Adolescence, as in real life, we see teachers stretched to breaking point—asked to be educators, parents, therapists, social workers, behaviour officers, and moral compasses all at once. And still expected to deliver perfect lessons, perfect results, perfect order.

In 2023, a headteacher’s suicide following an Ofsted inspection sent shockwaves through the profession.⁴ The pressure is relentless. A third of new teachers now leave the job within five years, and many more are walking away mid-career.⁵ Schools aren’t just short-staffed—they’re emotionally hollowed out. That has consequences for everyone inside them.

Technology is part of the problem, but it’s also a symptom. You can’t fight algorithmic radicalisation with a single assembly or a sign telling students to put their phones away. And even when teachers do try to engage (with PowerPoints, with interactive apps, with videos) it often becomes another way to keep students quiet.

In Adolescence, the classrooms we glimpse are nearly always watching a screen. That rang true for me. In my school, if a teacher didn’t know what to do with us, they’d put on a YouTube video. If they needed a moment of calm, they brought out the iPads.

That exhaustion matters. Because a burnt-out adult cannot create a culture of care.

And if we want to see what happens when that support vanishes, we only have to look at Adolescence.

Image via Netflix

Jamie is working-class. He goes to a state school. So did I. So did Katie. Mine was in Wales, but Adolescence might be the most searingly accurate depiction of British schooling I’ve ever seen.

When I mentioned it to my mum—a former teacher—she said the school looked exactly like the one she used to work in. I told her it looked exactly like the one I went to. When the police describe Jamie’s school as teetering on the edge of chaos, I don’t blink. That just looked like a Tuesday.

In Year 10, two boys stole our art teacher’s handbag and dangled her possessions out of the window while she begged for it back. Every English lesson—top set, by the way—one of them would bolt out the door, and the teacher would sigh, pick up the phone, and half the lesson would vanish in the scramble to find him.

The violence in Adolescence isn’t exaggerated—it’s familiar. One afternoon in art, a boy and a girl started throwing PVA glue at each other. It ended with a full tub poured over his head, sketchbooks ruined. In Year 11, sixteen boys broke into a brawl in the canteen. Our head of year took off her shoes and sprinted across the hall to break it up, like she was in some war film.

I can’t imagine how the pupils in my year would’ve reacted if one of us had been murdered by another.

I’ve been out of compulsory education for a few years now, and being at university has given me the distance to reflect. It’s especially interesting hearing about my friends’ experiences, coming from all over the country.

My best friend, for instance, went to a top-performing all-girls school. Obviously, comparing that to a mixed state school is going to bring up some differences—especially around issues like misogyny—but I still think it raises a broader question: how are different educational environments made?

For me, it all comes down to respect. And value. How pupils are seen.

Her school wasn’t perfect, not by any means, but she wanted to be there. She felt respected. Valued. Maybe partly because the school viewed its students as academic assets (which is a problem in itself), but there was still a baseline of care.

Walk into a typical state school in a deprived area and that mutual respect often isn’t there. Not from staff. Not from students. And that absence shapes everything.

Because this isn’t just about bad behaviour. It’s about the emotional architecture of school. Who feels safe. Who feels seen. Who gets to be a child.

In Adolescence, they don’t. The kids might be ‘fucking impossible’—but so many of the adults in the show are placing impossible expectations on them. The lines between childhood and adulthood blur constantly, and no one seems sure how to respond.

This isn’t a criticism—quite the opposite. That tension is what makes the show so painfully honest. But it’s also what makes it so hard to watch.

Because when something as horrific as Katie’s murder happens, the adults begin treating all the children as though they’re already guilty. As though they’re not children at all.

That is what is jarring about Adolescence: you look at Jamie and you see a boy. He wets the bed when the police come for him; he has constellation wallpaper on his bedroom walls; he looks heartbreakingly young.

And yet, right to the very end, viewers are split—many refused to believe he was capable of murder, even after his confession. Some still aren’t convinced. But Adolescence was never a whodunnit. The question was never whether Jamie did it. The question was why.

The audience’s reaction to Jamie speaks volumes. It reflects something bigger—how adults treat certain children, both in the show and beyond it.

Katie sent an explicit photo to a boy she trusted, someone she wanted to impress. He shared it. Her classmates passed it on. She was humiliated, mocked, reduced to an image.

Jamie, in that devastating episode with the psychiatrist, speaks about her in chilling, sexualised terms. He objectifies her. He dehumanises her. Then he says he asked her out. Because when he saw how broken she was—how publicly shamed—he thought this was his moment. He tells us so himself. He thought he might finally get some female attention, now that she was too hurt to reject him.

And people are calling her the bully?

She was thirteen. She had been torn apart, first by her peers, then by the silence of adults who should have protected her.

And Jamie, who helped destroy her, thought her pain made her available. So when she commented on his Instagram posts, calling him an incel, it wasn’t bullying. It was retaliation.

Petty? Maybe. But how do you bully someone when you have no power? When the entire system—her school, her classmates, even some of the adults around her—had already decided she was fair game? Calling it bullying is a smokescreen. If they frame it as petty schoolyard cruelty, they don’t have to confront what actually happened to her.

And then there’s Jade.

The police can’t seem to understand why she’s angry. Why she lashes out. Why, just days after Katie’s murder, she gets into a fight with Jamie’s best friend. As if a thirteen-year-old girl is meant to process the brutal death of her best friend with quiet dignity. As if she’s not also trapped in the same system that failed Katie.

She can’t even be at home without her mother present—and it’s implied her mother is always working. She has one supportive teacher, yes, but it’s not enough to make school feel safe. And now she’s back in those same corridors where Katie was laughed at, slut-shamed, ignored. Watching the same people who stood by as it happened act like nothing’s changed.

Of course she lashes out.

And yet the show plays into the ‘angry Black girl’ trope, as if her rage isn’t justified. As if she’s not still a child—grieving, furious, scared.

Image via Netflix

The girls in Adolescence are not allowed to be girls. Not really. In episode four, a man in the hardware shop casually mentions there are groups of men online who support Jamie—who genuinely believe Katie’s murder was justified. That a thirteen-year-old girl deserved to die. For what? For a rumour? For rejecting a boy? For being too confident, too sexual, too visible?

Katie haunts the show. Her voice echoes through the soundtrack, but we never hear her speak. We see her only in photos and videos. She is constantly talked about, but never given the chance to speak for herself.

And in that silence, she becomes a projection: either the ‘slut’ reviled by the boys around her, or the tragic, frozen face in the school photo the DI slides across the table. Neither version is really her.

This is what Adolescence does so well. It shows how easily children, especially girls, are stripped of their complexity. How quickly they become symbols, warnings, scapegoats.

Katie isn’t allowed to be messy, flawed, in-progress. She has to be either perfect or damned. And that binary isn’t just dangerous—it’s fatal.

This all ties back to education. Because it’s easy to say schools need to tackle misogyny, but how do you teach kids to respect each other in a system that doesn’t respect them? How do you expect girls to feel safe, valued, listened to, when they’re growing up in schools that allow them to be slut-shamed, ignored, and blamed for their own trauma?

In my school, we had no sex education. No proper relationships education. The closest we got was a Year 7 homework assignment where we had to write a diary from the perspective of a sperm cell—something a class of 11-year-olds turned into a joke.

The only real ‘guidance’ we received was a set of patronising videos warning girls not to send nudes. Not boys not to pressure them. Not boys not to share them. Just girls, being told not to get themselves into trouble.

And now, as the government proposes reviewing RSHE guidance again—pushing for even stricter limits on what is ‘age-appropriate’—we risk going backwards.⁶ We risk offering students even less language, even less support, in a moment that demands more.

You can’t talk about discipline in schools without talking about power. About whose voices get heard. About which children are believed, protected, written off.

Katie was let down. Jade is being let down. And yes, even Jamie is being let down—by a system that gave him no boundaries, no care, no language for his pain until it turned violent.

Adolescence shows us what happens when education fails—not just academically, but morally, emotionally, structurally.

This isn’t just a story about one boy. It’s a story about what happens when schools become sites of containment rather than care. When punishment stands in for guidance. When silence is mistaken for structure. And when a generation of children are left to figure out sex, shame, violence, and grief in a system that sees them as problems long before it sees them as people.

This is the portrait Adolescence paints. Not a single failing, not one bad teacher or one violent boy—but a school culture stretched so thin that nobody feels protected. A place where care has been replaced by containment. Where boundaries are blurred, phones are omnipresent, and trauma goes unspoken until it explodes.

So when people call for schools to do more—more PSHE, more anti-misogyny work, more safeguarding—I don’t disagree. But we need to be honest about what we’re asking. You can’t fix digital violence with a worksheet. You can’t fix institutional misogyny with a one-off assembly. You need training. Investment. Time. A culture that supports teachers instead of stretching them to breaking point.

Adolescence doesn’t give us answers. But it does something more urgent. It shows us what school has become. If we’re paying attention, it should make us ask—not just what went wrong with Jamie, but what’s gone wrong with all of us.

And more urgently: what are we going to do about it?

This is very different to what I have previously posted here, but I didn’t know where else to put it. Watch Adolescence if you haven’t already.

1. Sky News, Keir Starmer backs campaign to show adolescence in schools, March 2025 (https://news.sky.com/story/starmer-backs-campaign-to-show-adolescence-in-schools-13331968)

2. BBC News, Adolescence writer calls for ‘radical action’ not role models, March 2025 (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0egyyq1z47o)

3. BBC News, Conservatives push for phone ban in schools, March 2025 (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cg4k0vw190go)

4. The Guardian, Headteacher took own life after Ofsted downgraded school, March 2023 (https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/mar/17/headteacher-killed-herself-after-news-of-low-ofsted-rating-family-says)

5. The Guardian, Third of teachers who qualified in the last decade have left the profession, January 2023 (https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/jan/09/third-of-englands-teachers-who-qualified-in-last-decade-have-left-profession)

6. BBC News, RSHE and RSE: What do children learn in sex education?, May 2024 (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/explainers-68173080)